Here's a long overdue status update that will hopefully answer some of the questions you may have about the last week.

1. Bruno started hanging with a "stuck cpu" linux kernel message. I don't know what causes this sort of thing. Moving all the services except uploads to other machines seems to have solved the problem, so far. Next week we're planning to replace Bruno with a Sun X4540 that the Lab was removing from service.

2. Around the same time, the Astropulse assimilators started failing with a message "-603 Cannot close TEXT or BYTE value." Turns out we had run up against another informix limit. I'm resolving that, but it's looking like we are only 1/8th of the way done after 24 hours. Until it's done we won't be able to generate Astropulse work.

3. New Data. Finally, in the last few weeks, we've gotten some data from 2014 split and out the door. Not a lot, though. There are a few reasons why it took so long. First, the Arecibo itself and the ALFA receiver that we use for SETI@home was offline for much of 2014 (mostly January to June), so we don't have that much data. Second, because of funding, Astronomy isn't top dog at Arecibo anymore, so Astronomers get a smaller fraction of the observing time. And compounding it is that disks are bigger and we don't send a box until it's full (to save on shipping costs), so it takes longer to fill a box of disks. Which brings us to...

4. Old Data. We have been working on old data. It's not a "make work" thing. Most of the data we've been sending had a problem the first time around. Either part of the data was left unprocessed, or the results were questionable. In addition, all the old data that has been sent had not been processed with S@H v7, so there was no autocorrelation analysis done on it. We've still got big chunks of data that have never been processed with Astropulse to send out. We don't believe in making work for the sake of making work.

5. Will we run out of data? It depends upon what you mean by that. We may run out of SETI@home data taken by the current data recorder, although there is still plenty of Astropulse data to process. Jeff is prioritizing the GBT data splitter, so we hope to have that on line before too long. It will also be the starting point for the next thing, which will be to use SERENDIP VI as a data recorder. It should be capable of much higher data rates (GBps) than the current recorder, and therefore much higher bandwidths. It should also give us our first taste of the 327MHz Sky Survey data.

Thanks for taking some of your other spare time, that you don't have, to let us know the status of things. It helps to clear up speculation about what may or may not being occurring behind the scenes.SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours Join the BP6/VP6 User Group today!

3. New Data. Finally, in the last few weeks, we've gotten some data from 2014 split and out the door. Not a lot, though. There are a few reasons why it took so long. First, the Arecibo itself and the ALFA receiver that we use for SETI@home was offline for much of 2014 (mostly January to June), so we don't have that much data. Second, because of funding, Astronomy isn't top dog at Arecibo anymore, so Astronomers get a smaller fraction of the observing time. And compounding it is that disks are bigger and we don't send a box until it's full (to save on shipping costs), so it takes longer to fill a box of disks.

I've just noticed that we're splitting 26se14as - so there's some astronomy still being done! 19 'tapes' in one day (and it's the full 50.20 GB, so there's probably at least one more in the pipeline) must be close to some sort of record.